


Slouching toward Ecstasy

by SylvanWitch



Category: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy - Sarah McLachlan, The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats
Genre: Falconry, Flyboys, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Permanent Injury, The Rising (1916), World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 20:44:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13302855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Patrick fled Ireland after the failed Rising, leaving behind his lover, Connor, and his beloved falcons.  He planned to die in the Royal Flying Corps in the Middle Eastern Theatre.  Instead, he met Lt. Chaz Billings, the one man who restored Patrick's desire to live.  Can Patrick overcome his fear of loving another and survive in the burning sky over Palestine?Or, the W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"/Sarah McLachlan "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" crossover no one asked for and you didn't know you needed.





	Slouching toward Ecstasy

**Author's Note:**

> My brain... This started as one of those ideas you get in the shower, you know? I was mis-remembering the last line of "The Second Coming" as "slouching toward Bethlehem," which, naturally, led me to think about how I listened to McLachlan's "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" so often that I wore out the cassette. The rest is, well, three days of personal writing history. Take it for what it's worth.
> 
> I did some research for this story, but I am no WWI Royal Flying Corps expert by any means. However, the injuries I describe come from my vivid memories of paging through a book of photographs taken at English sanitariums for wounded WWI veterans. 
> 
> Certain words and images throughout the story come directly from Yeats and McLachlan. I should apologize, but I'm shameless.

He could hear the dogs at a distance over the hill that divided him from everything he had known to that point.  On his wrist, Aife shifted restlessly, her hooded head turning toward the sound.

 

“There now, it’ll soon be over,” Patrick promised, removing first the falcon’s tresses and then the anklets themselves and dropping them to the damp earth.  The tiny plate embossed with the name of the manor which had been his home since birth gleamed faintly as the last rays of the setting sun caught it.

 

Aife ducked her head, seeking Patrick’s gauntlet and gripping it, hard enough to make a point but not so hard as to tear the thick leather.

 

“I know,” Patrick said.  The hounds were closer now.  “But I can’t take you where I’m going, and you deserve to be free.”

 

With a hand that shook only a little, Patrick removed the hood and shared a look with Aife, whom he’d raised by hand from a hatchling and who had been his constant companion for years.

 

“You have to go,” he said, moving his other, ungloved hand toward Aife’s talons where they gripped his gauntlet.

 

Aife dipped her head again and bit him, this time on the thin skin on the back of his hand, drawing blood.  Patrick grinned ruefully, “I’ll miss you, too, but you have to go.  You’re free now,” he said, fanning his wrist so that the bird spread its wings for balance.

 

“That’s it,” he encouraged, raising his arm in the traditional releasing position.  Aife made an uncertain hop, balancing on his index finger for a long moment before Patrick made the motion again, and she took flight.

 

He watched her turning in a widening gyre with mingled admiration and sorrow.  She was beautiful and certain in her flight, free now in a way he had never been.  As Aife grew to a dark speck against the greying twilight of dusk, Patrick called out, “Fare thee well, Aife,” but the falcon could not hear him, and he was at last alone.

 

*****

 

“The center cannot hold,” his colonel was saying, pointing to a smudge on the rough map sketched with charcoal.  His finger was squarely over the 10th Brigade troops.  That they were Irishmen like Patrick was not lost on him, the irony of his life both cold and bitter as iron on the tongue.

 

Patrick nodded.  As always, from the benefit of great height, the obvious was more apparent.  He’d taken the survey himself in _The Stooping Hawk_ , his somewhat decrepit DH2.  She’d seen service over France before being banished to the colonies—rather like Patrick himself, who after Australia had found himself attached to the Palestinian branch of the Middle East brigade of the Royal Flying Corps.

 

He’d tried to die, of course.  All young men of any character had made that attempt, many of them with a great deal more success than he’d had.

 

When the Rising had failed, when they’d come for him at the manor and driven him into the hills with dogs, Patrick had had no plan other than escape.

 

Having managed that much and having spent his last few coppers drowning his sorrows in a Laytown pub that reeked of rotting fish and spilt ale, Patrick had raised his bleary eyes from the dregs of his stout to find a one-eyed sergeant of the British Royal Army, who’d cuffed him across the back of the head, setting off a devilish ringing in Patrick’s ears, and said, “You’re a likely lad.”

 

Six weeks later, he’d found himself in Australia, where he was to take training as a pilot—something about his having the “eyes of a hawk and the expression of a buzzard,” as Sergeant Hammond had suggested—and here he was in Palestine flying missions in aid of the very army that had hunted him with hounds and driven him from his home for treason.

 

He supposed it was better than swinging from a rope.  There were cleaner ways to die.

 

“It’s suicide,” the colonel mused, glancing at Captain Evans for confirmation.  Evans, who’d been grooming his mustache with his usual focus—it really was a fantastic mustache—shrugged with his usual savoir faire. 

 

“We’ll stick it, won’t we boys?” the captain asked, and Patrick, like the other pilots sitting on uncomfortable wooden benches ranged around the briefing room, said, “Sir, yes sir!”  If some of them responded with less enthusiasm, that was alright—the sudden promise of a swift end to his misery gave Patrick’s answer a fervor that more than made up for their lack.

 

A few minutes later, briefing done and mail call over, Patrick exited into the dry desert air with a tattered, filthy envelope in his hand, its cream-colored linen now grey with long travel but the faintest suggestion of a scent unmistakable, even had the familiar handwriting not already thrown his heart into a frantic tattoo against his ribs.

 

_Connor._

 

*****

 

The last time Patrick had seen Connor Aidan Fleming, he’d been breathless, usually neat red hair in wild disarray around his narrow, freckled, beloved face and green eyes wide and bright with alarm.  He’d come to the mews in untucked shirt and half-buttoned breeches to warn Patrick that there was an Army officer at the main house, that he’d been named a traitor and must flee.

 

“Come with me,” Patrick had begged, taking Connor’s slim body into his arms, pressing him close, imminent danger making this apparent incaution pale by comparison. 

 

Patrick had never before touched Connor where they might be seen, certainly not here under the broad, watching sky nor within sight of the main house.  He relished the slender strength of Connor’s arms, his flat, hard belly, the taper of his waist.  Most of all, he drank in the way that even the wan afternoon light set strands of his hair afire.

 

He’d felt Connor’s lips against his throat as he’d said, “I cannot.”

 

“You must!”

 

Connor had been a courier for the cause.  He’d carried ammunition to Ashbourne for Patrick and the others.  He could be accused, though most would not have the temerity to name him.  He could die in a miserable, dank cell or swing in the killing summer heat.

 

“I cannot,” Connor had said again, pushing away from him.  “You know I cannot.”

 

He was the lord’s only son, betrothed just that Epiphany to the daughter of a neighboring lord.

 

Connor shook his head, eyes wet, “I’ll be fine.  I’ll be safe.”

 

He might.  His status would protect him better than ever Patrick could.  It was a bitter truth that offered cold comfort.

 

“You must go!” Connor said, pushing Patrick with both hands, strong and fierce and beautiful, tears, uncaged, pouring down his cheeks, almost wild in his insistence that Patrick save himself.

 

Patrick had gone with the salt of Connor’s tears in his mouth and a weight of dread in his belly that had never yet left him.

  
He knew that he’d never see Connor again.  Connor was as free of him as Aife was and as wild.

 

Now Patrick held Connor’s letter in his hands, the dread growing as he took in the first words—

 

_I am married_

 

almost failing to comprehend the rest of the letter, about a child, a son, with red hair—Connor’s—and the deep brown eyes he got from Connor’s wife, Margaret, whom Patrick had seen once from afar, the servants lining the drive to welcome her arrival at the manor for their engagement dinner.

 

_We will be happy.  I will make sure that we are happy.  Be safe, my love.  Be whole, for me.  Be happy too._

 

And then

 

_You must never come home._

 

Patrick had already known that, of course.  The war wouldn’t have erased the warrant for his arrest.  His service under an assumed name would mean nothing in the long memories of the RIC, home rule or no home rule.

 

Anyway, he didn’t have a home without Connor. 

 

Now, in his tent, dusty canvas between his boot soles and the desert, Patrick supposed he didn’t need a home.  They’d been given their mission.  It wasn’t one from which he’d likely return. 

 

His dreams, lately, had all been of Aife falling soundless in a narrowing gyre from a blank white sky, plummeting into the open maw of a great rough beast, its huge lion’s thighs shifting restlessly in the sand, its human face turned upward, mouth open to devour Aife and the sky and the whole trembling world.

 

Nerveless hands let the letter flutter to the dusty floor, where it folded a little in on itself, hiding the familiar writing that hurt his heart so to look upon it.

 

Patrick flopped back onto his cot, closing his eyes against a sudden urge to scream.

 

He’d known, of course.  He’d known Connor would move on—that had been inevitable even had Patrick not been named a traitor and had to flee.  Patrick, as an apprentice falconer, a common man, was for the wars—his own or his oppressor’s had been the only question. 

 

But Connor, by dint of his title and being an only son, was protected from that death and instead remanded, restless and resentful, to the promise of progeny. 

 

It may have been that restlessness that had first attracted Patrick to Connor, the way he seemed to fly against his jesses and struggle valiantly against the line tethering him to the manor.

 

It was the rebellion in Patrick that had driven Connor to him, though it wasn’t the cause of independence that most attracted Connor.

 

No, it was a far more dangerous betrayal of trust that Connor sought from Patrick’s willing hands and giving mouth.  Had Connor been captured for the cause of Irish independence, he’d have died, surely, but had his father discovered Connor’s true passion, well…that would have been far worse.

 

It was more than enough reason for Connor to pursue him, and Patrick, fool that he was for lost causes—well, Patrick had been eager to fall prey to Connor’s single-minded pursuit.

 

Thinking of Connor’s desire did nothing to settle Patrick’s anguish except to stir in him a vague answering appetite that could not be assuaged, not here and now, probably not ever again.

 

He was just climbing out of the well of his self-pity when one of his tent-mates and fellow pilots, Charles Billings, burst through the flap with his usual noise, on his mustachioed face a wide grin and in his hand a bottle.

“We’re drinking like kings tonight, Paddy!” Chaz said, brandishing the bottle.  “Old Powers, straight from your homeland,” he explained.  “Gift from a friend.”  This accompanied by a wink intended to suggest that said friend had given Chaz more than the pleasure of a good glass of whisky.

 

Patrick—who’d kept his first name but swapped his last for the laughably generic “Murphy”—would have been lying to himself if he’d said he hadn’t been attracted to his bunkmate.  Chaz had been on training with him in Australia and had befriended Patrick despite Patrick’s churlishness and what Chaz had referred to as his “Byronic sulks.”

 

“Paddy,” Chaz had said early on in their friendship, “There’s a jolly bloke in there somewhere, and I aim to chivvy him out.”

 

Chaz was taller than Patrick’s six feet by two inches, broader in the shoulders, with a big barrel chest and a slender, swimmer’s waist. Chaz had merry blue eyes and chestnut brown hair with a matching mustache that challenged Captain Evans’ for ascendancy.

 

And he seemed utterly indiscriminate in his affections, as Patrick had reason to know.  More than once before he’d gotten used to life in the military, Patrick had walked in on Chaz and a fellow airman swapping hand jobs in the communal shower.

 

The first time, Chaz had merely winked at him, but the second time he’d said, “Twice isn’t a coincidence, kid.  Can we help you with something?” Patrick had fled, blushing from the top of his head to the tips of his toes and feeling a complete arse.

 

He’d also seen Chaz with partners of the female persuasion.  If Chaz was the least bit ashamed of any of his appetites, he didn’t show it to Patrick, and on several occasions, Patrick thought his bunkmate might have been flirting with him.

 

Patrick hadn’t responded, of course, not only because his heart was still raw from loss but also because he didn’t know what it would be like to be loved and then left by someone he had to see every day and who flew at his wing into bursting black flak.

 

 _Fraternitas_ would only work until it didn’t, and while Patrick had a death wish, he didn’t want to go down in flames because he’d been strafed by his own side.

 

Which was the English side, he sometimes had to remind himself.  Chaz was English, a Brit through and through.  Patrick should have despised him—he was not in this war to preserve the motherland, after all, but because it was a convenient way to die.  Try as he might to resent Chaz’s origins, however, Patrick couldn’t seem to find it in him.  It seemed impossible to resist Chaz’s ebullience for long.

 

And anyway, what did it matter?  This time tomorrow, he’d be ashes and memory.

 

So when Chaz dropped a second wink on him, saying, “We’ve got the palace to ourselves tonight,” and cracked the seal on the bottle, Patrick didn’t offer any protest.  As he stood up, his boot brushed Connor’s letter, and with a fury that flared up and died in an instant, he scuffed it out of sight under his bunk.

 

Three shots and two hours later, as the sun was painting the tent canvas a muted orange, Chaz said, “Things fall apart,” with an insouciant shrug that seemed insulting in the light of Patrick’s confession.

 

Maybe it had been the whisky or the imminent death or Chaz’s musky aftershave or some combination of those three, but Patrick had felt inclined to unburden his soul.

 

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected—maybe a consolatory blow job—but Chaz’s seeming indifference was not it. 

 

Feeling rebuffed, he rose unsteadily, swaying a little before he gained his balance, and started to cross the treacherously pitching sea that their tent floor had become.

 

A grip like a vise on his wrist drew him up short, and he turned back carefully—his center was off—to see Chaz’s face wearing an expression of contrition all out of keeping with his other hand, which did not seem even remotely repentant as it traced a line of heat up Patrick’s back through his uniform shirt.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said, words and tone still not matching the action of his hand, which was busy pulling Patrick’s shirt from his trousers to get at the skin beneath it. 

 

Patrick shook his head and immediately regretted it, having to close his eyes tight shut against the way the room swooped and bellied around him.  When he had control of his gorge again, he realized that Chaz’s hands were now on his hips, holding but not tugging, and that Chaz was looking up at him with an expression Patrick had not seen before.

 

If he didn’t know better, he’d have said that Chaz was being serious—genuinely serious—which was all out of keeping with his usual character.  But then, maybe this was just another of the many weapons in Chaz’s arsenal of seduction, like his boyish smile and his devilish winks.

 

“I thought it was a schoolboy’s dream,” Chaz explained, licking his lips nervously.  Patrick had trouble paying attention to his next words because he was distracted by the thought of what that tongue would feel like in his mouth.  “A lot of the boys who come here—” and Patrick was sober enough to make a noise of protest—he was no boy!—“young men,” Chaz corrected himself, “they have sob stories about the lass they left behind.  I thought yours was just a variation on the tale.”  He shrugged, but this time there was something rueful in the gesture, and Patrick felt a grudging redemption that Chaz was seeing things as they were at last.

 

And then through the alcoholic fog, he realized dimly that perhaps what he’d had with Connor had been less serious than Patrick himself had believed.  After all, if Connor had really wanted to stay with Patrick, he could have.  Boys—even landed, titled boys—ran off to war.  It was a thing that privileged young men did quite often, in fact.

 

But Connor hadn’t come with him.  He’d stayed in his safe home with his father and his privilege and his supposedly hated expectations, and he’d gone on without Patrick, apparently quite content to assuage whatever guilt lingered in his fickle heart by sending Patrick a farewell note, as if it absolved him of all the hurt he’d caused.

 

And then, in a twinkling of Chaz’s bright eyes, Patrick recognized the welling self-pity again and how pathetic it was for him to be mooning about, trying his damnedest to die when there was a man like Chaz—warm, enormous hands bracketing his hips; bright blue eyes fixed on Patrick as though through look alone he could will Patrick to understand.

 

“Are you seducing me?” he asked, pleased when the sibilant didn’t slur from his suddenly thick tongue.

 

“I’m asking you into my bed, yes,” Chaz said, running his thumbs restlessly along Patrick’s flanks where his hands gripped him. 

 

“But?” 

 

Chaz shook his head and took his hands away, and Patrick felt bereft.

 

“There are no strings,” Chaz said, showing his empty hands as if to say there was nothing up his sleeve.  “I want you for as long or as little time as you’ll have me.”

 

Patrick felt a bitter bubble of disbelief well up from his gut, and he said, “Why?”  It sounded like a challenge.

 

“Because you’re beautiful,” Chaz said almost dismissively, “And you’re thoughtful of others and you can be funny as hell when you aren’t sulking around.  But mostly because your eyes see everything but never judge.  That’s rare.”

 

By the end of Chaz’s catalogue, Patrick’s face was aflame, and he took a step back just to try for more air because suddenly being so close to Chaz made him feel hot and then cold with panic, a dread that started at his heart and raced outward in frantic bolts of electric, like he had a live wire inside of him whipping around.

 

He’d been here before, once.  He’d looked at a handsome man who was better than he—no doubt Chaz would argue, but Patrick knew quality when he saw and heard it—and he’d seen a hope in promising eyes, a hope he’d had no right to expect nor any expectation to keep.

 

“I can’t,” he said at last, cheeks burning now for shame at his weakness, his cowardice.  He’d fly into hell tomorrow, but tonight he couldn’t lie down and let himself be loved.

 

Chaz stood and crossed the space between them, reaching for him but not touching him, saying, “I won’t hurt you.”

 

“You’re a playboy,” Patrick pointed out.  “You don’t care about me.”

Something like pain crossed Chaz’s face, and Patrick felt his shame more deeply.  Chaz didn’t deserve to be the target of Patrick’s self-loathing.

 

“I do care about you,” Chaz said, none of his characteristic bluster in his suddenly soft voice.  “I don’t have any right to say this, Patrick, but we’re going to die tomorrow, so to hell with it—I do care about you, a great deal, maybe even…”  He shook his head, as if frustrated with the limits of language.

 

“Let me love you tonight,” he asked.  “Let us have this night.  Please.”

 

Grown men didn’t beg.  That was something Patrick’s laconic, patient father had taught him over years of serving a proud and sometimes cruel lord.  No matter what was threatened, a grown man never asked for quarter, not without sacrificing something he couldn’t get back.

 

Yet here was Chaz, not pleading, precisely, but asking in a way that left no question about who had the power here, and he seemed stronger for chasing after what he wanted than he might have if he’d let Patrick’s fear stand in the way of what they could have.

 

 _It’s only a night_ , Patrick told himself, but he knew that was a lie even as he thought it.  He felt it in his bones, in his muscles and tendons, in the rapid patter of his heart and the coursing blood that heated his veins.

 

“Yes,” he said, but it came out a hoarse whisper—his throat was so dry, his tongue so fat—so he tried again, saying, “Yes,” and looking directly into Chaz’s eyes.

 

Chaz made a sound and then reached for Patrick, who met him halfway, and then Chaz was bending his head and their mouths were touching and Patrick felt the warm pressure of Chaz’s tongue, and he opened his mouth willingly, tasting the smoky, peaty tang of whisky and feeling the muscular slide all the way down to his cock.

 

He made a sound himself, a desperate, animal noise, and clung to Chaz as the wave of want weakened his knees and he lost his balance, going backward onto his bunk, Chaz following him more deliberately, a knee between his spraddled thighs, hands on his shirt buttons and then at his trouser fly, and he himself helpless to do anything but let Chaz undo him.

 

With Connor there’d been a furtive urgency to their coupling.  They’d never had the luxury of time or privacy, taking what they could get—hurried hand jobs or one another’s mouths, knees grinding hay into the fabric of their trousers, a knuckle between the teeth to keep from crying out and betraying their location and illicit activities.

 

And there’d been no finesse to it, not even on the one night when Patrick’s father had been away and Connor had laid him down in his own bed, the one and only time they’d ever joined in that most intimate of ways.

 

Here and now, Chaz’s hands were sure and gentle on his skin, his fingers teasing gasps from him with every exploratory touch, his eyes avid on Patrick’s face to watch for changes in his expression, learning his body thoroughly, almost worshipfully, before letting Patrick at last ease back from the brink of orgasm while he took off his own clothes.

 

That first time Chaz stretched himself out over Patrick and lined their hard cocks up and moved against him, Patrick thought he’d die.  He took in air too quickly, choked on it, and then tried not to cry out as Chaz wrapped his hand around them both and moved again.

 

“What—” he tried, but words were beyond him.  He wanted to ask what Chaz wanted, wanted to offer him anything, everything, but he couldn’t think anymore, could only feel the strength of Chaz’s callused hand, the power in his thighs, the sensation of their calves brushing as Chaz shifted minutely, driving down at a slightly different angle, catching Patrick on an exhale that punched out of him with a moan.

 

Chaz swooped down to cover his mouth and began to wring sounds out of him with every stroke, setting up a broken rhythm of hips and hand that sparked a heavy fire in his belly and had him thrusting unconsciously upward to meet each movement.

 

He was sweaty and panting and utterly wrecked when Chaz said, “Look at me, Patrick,” and he did as bidden, levering his eyes open with an effort to see Chaz poised above him, close enough to see flecks of green in the bright blue of his eyes and to see the heat of his gaze, the way he wanted Patrick—

 

The way he loved him.

 

Patrick came all at once with a bitten-off shout, neck muscles cording and teeth clenched to keep from making sounds that even the Turks sixty kilometers away would hear.

 

Over him, Connor panted his name and a litany of love-words and stuttered in his frantic thrusting and came with a splash of wet heat, his seed joining Patrick’s in a heady mess on his belly.

 

There was precious little space on an army bunk for one man, but Chaz managed to wheedle himself between Patrick and the tent wall, hooking a strong forearm around his waist and pulling him close, spooned back to front against the furnace of Chaz’s chest. 

 

Chaz’s fingers made lazy patterns in the mess on Patrick’s belly as they laid there together regaining their breath.

 

Finally, Chaz put a gentle kiss against the knob at the top of Patrick’s spine.

 

“I can clean us up,” he offered, pushing himself up on one elbow and putting another kiss on Patrick’s cheek.

 

“We’re only going to get dirty again,” Patrick said and was gratified by the laughter that shook them both as Chaz answered, “That’s true. We’ve got all night.”

 

And they took it, greedily, twisting every minute into an hour as they talked and drank and learned each other outside and in.

 

The room was a welter of strewn clothing and candlelight, dim and intimate and hot, when Chaz at last pushed inside Patrick, stuttering in his thrust, closing his eyes against the sensation, saying, “Give me a minute,” on a gasp and Patrick stilling himself with a smile, seeing what he’d done to Chaz, that he’d stripped him of control even if Chaz was the one on top. 

 

Patrick at last shifted his hips minutely and said, “Please,” and Chaz broke then, making muscular, erratic thrusts that drove a spike of searing pleasure through Patrick’s center and had them both coming in a trice.

 

They fell asleep as the first vague shapes of the external world painted themselves in pre-dawn greys on the canvas, and in that grey sleep Patrick dreamed again of the rough beast with the pitiless gaze shifting restlessly to shake the desert from its hide, the raucous cawing of indignant desert birds signaling impending doom, their circling shadows vast against the rippling tan canvas of the earth below them.

 

Those shadows transformed into the sharper lines of biplanes and the cawing became the coughing of an engine in distress.  It was to a screaming shell-burst that Patrick awoke, heart thumping in his throat, Chaz’s arm tightening around him even in sleep, as if to protect him from the uneasiness that turned his belly to a roiling stew.

 

Eventually, reveille woke them both, though, and they stumbled to the showers, where they pretended that they hadn’t spent the night naked together, sharing everything that mattered.

 

Judging by the ragged edges on every man who gathered at the mess for breakfast that morning, they weren’t the only ones who’d found consolation in another’s arms, though Patrick was pretty sure none of them had discovered his one true love as he and Chaz had done.

 

 _I won’t fear love_ , Patrick told himself for the sixth or seventh time as he took his plate of runny eggs and his cup of strong tea over to the table where Chaz was eating avidly and avoiding Patrick’s eyes. 

 

Patrick wasn’t hurt—he understood precisely.  If he looked at Chaz too long or vice versa it would be apparent for everyone to see.  Their love was like an aerial bombardment—obvious even to the most oblivious souls and just as likely to do immense damage as it changed the landscape of their lives.

 

They were, after all, still two pilots in his majesty’s Royal Flying Corps.

 

A chill touched the small of his back as Patrick remembered the dream of the beast and the birds, and his tea went down the wrong hatch and he hacked and coughed his way to a rough finish before standing up abruptly and leaving for muster.

 

Chaz couldn’t be seen to hurry to his side, but he could fall in there, that was natural enough, they were friends, after all, and if he shifted in place and brushed his shoulder against Patrick’s, well, no one was likely to think anything of it.

  
Patrick risked a glance, which Chaz caught and held, and then Patrick dipped his chin once to acknowledge that he was okay, and Chaz winked saucily and turned to engage the guy on his other side, Watson, with a bawdy question about how Watson had spent his “last night.”

 

This led to the usual round of braggadocio and one-upmanship that Patrick typically stayed out of, and this morning’s badinage was no exception.

 

Eventually, the sergeant called them to attention and the colonel gave a few words on courage and honor and the sacrifice of Englishmen, and then Captain Evans was giving them orders and the sergeant was passing out the mission’s signal code, and he was too busy memorizing it to think about the fact that they were going off to die.

 

It struck him only as Chaz walked away from him on the runway near the hangar where their planes were blocked in a neat row.  Those broad shoulders, that bright hair, the trim waist and jaunty walk—he’d never see it again, not if he or Chaz died this day.

 

And he couldn’t bear that their last words had been banter about the quality of breakfast, so he said, “Lieutenant Billings?”

 

Chaz turned around and cast him a salute, but Patrick shook his head and said, “A word?”

 

 _I won’t fear love_ , he reminded himself as Chaz neared, and Patrick said, voice pitched low and as private as it got on a busy airfield:  “I love you.”

 

Chaz’s eyes widened a fraction and then filled with heat and love and a dozen other things Patrick had only seen for the first time that very morning, as they’d moved together in the candlelit dark.

 

“I love you, Patrick Murphy.”  Another wink, and then the casual brush of his knuckles across the back of Patrick’s hand and then a step away and then two and a rakish salute and Patrick couldn’t have called after him for his heart in his throat and his mind reeling with the sudden understanding that he didn’t want to die anymore.

 

*****

 

The bombing run went smoothly, fighters strafing the ground artillery, Patrick experiencing his usual exhilaration at the speed and the swooping joy of aerial acrobatics as he took the _Spiritus Mundi_ , his Bristol Scout, through evasion maneuvers to avoid the heavy flak bursting around him from the remaining guns.

 

Off his left wing, he could see Chaz’s _Valiant_ stooping like a hawk, gun blazing as he found a target, and then the deadly metal cloud surrounding the _Mundi_ dissipated like so much smoke.

 

The bombers loosed their payload as Patrick and Chaz and the others picked off their opposition on the ground, and at the captain’s signal they made their wide turn westward into the sun.

 

It happened just as they completed that arc, first a sound like a tire popping and then pressure against his back and then heat.  He craned his neck around to see that his rudder had been shot to hell, and he discovered that his stick barely responded to his touch.

 

The sudden roaring of another aircraft too near alerted him to the danger, and he wrapped both hands around the stick and wrestled the Mundi back onto her course, more or less.

 

It was a herculean effort, and he felt the muscles of his shoulders bunch and scream as he battled gravity and wind to keep her steady.

 

He was losing altitude, but he needed only to stay aloft long enough to put her down inside friendly lines.

 

So intent was Patrick upon his own survival that he didn’t at once understand what he was hearing until it came to him that the high-pitched receding whine was sickeningly familiar—so familiar that he’d at first overlooked it.

 

Someone was going down.

 

He looked first to his left, searching for the _Valiant_ and seeing nothing.  Taking the pressure of the stick between his knees for a precious few seconds, he peered up and over the side of his plane, desperate to catch sight of Chaz, who’d probably only dropped down or back to support the _Mundi_ on her limping flight homeward.

 

But a quick survey of the squadron told him the truth of the matter, which was that the black smoke trailing in a tight gyre earthward was from the _Valiant_. Chaz was hit and going down in flames behind enemy lines.

  
Patrick screamed the vilest curses, yanking at his unresponsive stick to break formation and follow Chaz down, to land somehow and find him, pull him from the wreckage and bring him home safe and sound.

 

Suddenly, Evans’ _Intrepid_ loomed before him, the captain’s signal unmistakable:  All is lost.  Return to base.

 

Patrick shook his head, signaled, _Negative.  Negative.  Search and rescue._

 

Evans was adamant, and as Atwater and Watson flanked him, the awful truth came over him that they were leaving Chaz behind.

 

If there were tears on his face when they pulled him from the smoking wreckage of the _Mundi_ , they’d doubtless attributed it to his injuries, which were severe:  both legs broken, several ribs, and a lung full of toxic smoke from being trapped in the cockpit when the engine caught fire.

 

“It’s a miracle you put her down at all,” the captain said much later, when Patrick wheezed to consciousness in the medical tent. 

 

Patrick privately thought the miracle would have been if he had died instead because it had taken him only seconds to remember that Chaz was gone, a fact confirmed by a grim-faced captain after Patrick managed the few words necessary to ask.

 

“I’m afraid there’s no chance.  Miller returned to recon the scene right after we got you back to the field.  He said the wreck was a smoking hole in the ground.  I’m afraid there’s no way Billings could have survived it.  I’m sorry.  He was a damned fine lad.  Damned fine.”

 

Patrick nodded and closed his eyes as if he were weary, hiding the real pain, which had nothing to do with the broken glass in his throat and lungs nor the screaming agony of his shattered legs.

 

He hoped he’d die in transport to the main hospital at Cairo or on the table when they put the metal in his legs to hold him together or when the fever wrung screaming dreams out of him.

 

In the dreams, he was falling like a Scout, head-first and spinning, and beside him on one side was Aife in her frantic dive and on the other Chaz, laughing like a maniac, eyes alight and hair on fire.

 

He woke with a shout when they hit the ground, and then the nurse gave him another shot of morphine and he was falling upward in a widening gyre while below him the beast snapped its jaws and roared.  And then the roar turned into the sound of an engine and he was seated in the _Hawk_ looking down on a line of Turkish ants swarming the smoking remains of a Bristol Scout, pulling from the wreck the mangled body of a bright-haired Englishman.

 

Again and again and again he fell screaming from the sky.  Again and again he watched the remains of his beloved dragged like a sack of garbage from the cockpit of his plane.

 

When at last the fever broke and he awoke once and for all from the delirium, Patrick had lost two stone, his appetite, and the ability to take a deep breath without coughing.

 

They invalided him out as soon as they believed he could survive the slow ship’s passage back to England, where a sanitarium that had once been a manor awaited him in a green valley of the Cotswolds.

 

Here, he did his best to die, living behind a hazy scrim of opium, the world a wavering and indefinite thing beyond his ken, refusing to do his exercises or try to regain his strength, wanting only to die in a most un-Englishman-like way.

 

Even this small victory over the oppressors gave him no satisfaction.

 

At night he fell silently through a blank and pitiless desert sky, birds wheeling around him, beast maw gaping from the sand below, Chaz lifeless and spiraling beside him, Aife with a broken wing calling piteously for Patrick’s aid as she, too, plunged to earth.

 

He had determined that he would end his own life as soon as an opportunity presented itself, but he soon realized that there was little chance of that if he was confined to his bed.  With suicide a perverse motivation for improvement, Patrick went about the agonizing process of getting up and learning to use his crutches, with their unwieldy arm-cuffs and awkward weight.

 

He found found his way first to the near end of the ward, where there was a lavatory, and then to the far end, where a wide window revealed a view of the glowing green hillsides around the estate.

 

After a time, Patrick was strong enough to go outside, though his forearms shook with the effort and every step was perilous, even on the pea-gravel paths that led in pleasing loops through English gardens and across croquet-ready lawns.

 

He had decided to steal a bottle of morphine, find a place outside beneath the sky, and fall asleep forever, but until he could master the nurses’ schedule and figure out a way to get the key to the medicines cabinet from the head nurse, Patrick had to keep up appearances.

 

To that end, when a nervous young nurse’s aide named Meghan came to him one bright June morning and said, “Would you like to see the mews?  Only I heard you in your sleep speaking of falcons,” she explained.

 

His face as hot as hers with embarrassment over this unintended intimacy, he nevertheless felt a jolt of excitement at the thought of seeing falcons.  Hating himself a little for so easily abandoning the singular pursuit of death, and telling himself he was only biding his time, he went with Meghan to a little slate-roofed house in a boxwood partition set well back from the main house and with access to a long, narrow valley perfect for training.

 

There, he met Alastair, another veteran, who wheezed and coughed his way through an introduction, and then Patrick spent a pleasant afternoon learning the birds’ names and their habits.

 

Alastair, who’d been a sergeant in the infantry and gassed that spring on the Western Front, spoke very little—he had no breath for it—but seemed amenable to Patrick’s company and help.

 

That night, Patrick still fell through a flak-bruised desert sky, but Aife flew beside him unharmed, her cries urgent, as though trying to communicate something vital.  Chaz fell beside him like a rag doll, blue eyes empty of life, but this time, Patrick woke himself before they struck earth.

 

The next morning, he learned that Head Nurse Monihan kept the keys to the medicines cabinet in her top left desk drawer and the key to that drawer on a chain around her neck.

 

He resolved to steal a letter opener to jimmy the desk’s lock and allowed Meghan to escort him to the mews, where Alastair suggested in a few well-chosen words that Patrick could only handle the birds himself if he were “sober as a church matron.”

 

That night and all the next day, Patrick sweated and shook his way out of the opium, through an in-between place, not quite awake, not fully asleep, where his body seized and juddered on the bed but his mind was free to suffer Chaz’s death over and over, his teeth clenched against the terrible sounds he wanted to make, his eyes clenched against the tears that ran into his hair and added to the salty swamp his pillow had become.

 

Deep on the second night of his suffering, Patrick felt something loosen in his chest, and though he still wheezed like a bellows and hacked up gobs of bloody phlegm, he felt clearer in mind and stronger in body than he had in a good long while.

 

He cried like a baby when he realized he’d betrayed himself and that it seemed after all he might want to live.

 

He didn’t go to the mews the following day, despite Meghan’s awkward attempts to chivvy him out of bed, but finally, three days after he’d begun the process of not dying, Patrick put his feet on the ground and his hands in his crutch grips and walked himself out to the mews, stopping only twice to regain his breath.

 

His days went on like that for some time, his strength and breath both gradually improving.  Eventually, he was able to walk with the aid of a cane only, and he’d graduated to training a fledgling falcon named Maisie when Alastair died in his sleep, drowned on dry land by the Germans.

 

Surprisingly touched by this loss—he’d been mostly numb since he’d decided not to die, only the birds themselves bringing him any joy—Patrick vowed to preserve the mews and take care of Alastair’s precious birds.

 

Before he knew it, six months had passed and he was training a new apprentice, a weedy, black-haired Irish boy named Liam who warbled when he talked and had a fist-sized scar beneath his left collarbone, where a piece of shrapnel had punched a hole clean through him.

 

The days were mostly fine, few words to be exchanged, only the cries of the falcons in flight or the rustling of their wings as they settled on their perches to break the soughing of the pines and the rhythm of the hours. 

 

If the nights were still restless for Patrick, at least he didn’t dream as often of Chaz falling from the sky, and once in a very great while, he didn’t dream at all except in fragments of smiles and winks and words he couldn’t remember when he awoke the next morning, frustrated and a little breathless and achingly hard.

 

It was six weeks after the armistice and three days after the head matron had informed Patrick that he was being discharged when Maisie, unhooded on his arm made an aggrieved sound and nibbled urgently at his gloved fingers.

 

Patrick looked around, wondering if there were a wild raptor disturbing her equanimity; she was usually the most easygoing of birds.

 

Above him on the ridge was a familiar silhouette—broad shoulders, barrel chest, narrow waist—and Patrick swallowed the painful lump in his throat, shaking his head bitterly at his own folly and calling out, “Can I help you?  Stay there until I get her hooded, please.”

 

Maisie, still unsettled, fought his shaking fingers as he attempted to get the hood on her, so it was several minutes before he looked up from his task to see that the figure had disappeared.

 

He was both disappointed and relieved; while he usually found visitors a distraction from his work, he had been stupidly hopeful about this one, and that only made him angrier at himself.

 

So what if the figure had appeared similar to Chaz?  There were plenty of big men in England now that the war had ended.  He wondered if he were going mad and then reflected that he wouldn’t mind it so much, as long as it didn’t interfere with the falconry.

 

Stepping into the feather-loud, musty dimness of the mews usually settled Patrick in a way nothing else did anymore, but it always took a moment for his eyes to adjust, and when they did, it was to see a hulking shadow at the end farthest from the door.

 

Dylan was nowhere to be found.

  
“Who are you?” he asked, forgetting his manners.  Wealthy benefactors who contributed to the upkeep of the sanitarium came by occasionally to view the product of their charity.  If Patrick found them smug and proprietorial, it wasn’t the benefactors’ fault.  He should keep a civil tongue, he knew.

 

Still, “You really shouldn’t be in here without one of us.”

 

The figure stepped out of the darkness and into a shaft of dusty light from one of the tiny, narrow windows that ran horizontally below the mews’ eaves.

 

At first, Patrick didn’t understand what he was seeing; the man looked as though he was only half-finished, ripped from the mold before he had been allowed fully to set.

 

Or as though he’d been trapped in a burning cockpit, “Oh, god,” Patrick said as he took a lunging step, forgetting his own infirmity, his bad legs, even the fledgling on his arm, so frantic to reach, to touch, to affirm for certain what his heart was insisting but his mind continued to doubt.

 

Maisie flapped to a perch, scolding shrilly, but Patrick didn’t hear her because the figure was saying his name in a rasping, broken whisper, and he was holding Chaz’s ruined, beloved face between his hands, and the twisted lips were kissing him, the strong arms pulling him close, the hard body pressing against him from ankles to chest, and he’d have laid himself down and spread himself wide on the filthy floor of the mews if there hadn’t been a nervous throat-clearing from the doorway behind him and Dylan saying, “You have a visitor—oh!”

 

Patrick broke away laughing, his face wet with tears he hadn’t realized he was shedding, and he couldn’t look away from Chaz for fear that he’d disappear.  The left side of his face was a drooping ruin of flesh, like red clay crumpled before the kiln and then baked.  There was a black patch over Chaz’s left eye, and the scalp over his left temple was bald and scarred like the flesh of his face.  His lips didn’t meet on the left side anymore, and a red gap showed the gleam of teeth there.

 

The right side of his face was mostly the same, save for the deep pain lines around Chaz’s right eye and a deeper uncertainty clouding its expression.  Patrick understood that Chaz wasn’t sure of his reception, that he was afraid Patrick would find him unsightly, and he wanted more than anything to show him right then and there exactly how beautiful Chaz was in his sight.

 

A nervous scuff of feet behind him reminded Patrick that they weren’t alone, however, and there were proprieties to be followed.  

 

He half-turned and indicated Chaz with his gauntleted hand.  “This is Lieutenant Charles Billings, Royal Flying Corps,” and then gestured with the same hand to Dylan. “Chaz, this is my apprentice falconer, Private Dylan O’Hearn.  He was 10th Brigade in Palestine,” Patrick added, knowing that Chaz would understand the significance better than anyone else could.

 

Dylan took a hesitant step in and offered an awkward handshake, which Chaz returned with achingly familiar gusto, though there was a somewhat plastic smile on the good side of his face, for Dylan was having difficulty making eye contact.  Whether that was because of Chaz’s extensive scarring or because Dylan had just walked in on Patrick and Chaz’s passionate embrace was anyone’s guess.

 

“I can settle Maisie,” Dylan offered then, “If you’d like to…”  He made an indefinite gesture, eyes anywhere but Patrick’s face, and Patrick realized all at once that Dylan was just embarrassed for having interrupted them.

 

He felt a warm fondness swelling in his heart for the boy and grinned ruefully.  “Sorry you had to walk in on that.  We’ll keep it to ourselves next time.”

 

“Oh!” Dylan managed, blushing furiously, “Th-that’s alright, then.”

 

Chaz’s laugh, raspier now but still familiar, followed Patrick out of the mews and down the valley toward the far end, where a weed-choked gazebo had been left to return to the elements from which it had once been wrested.

 

Patrick had spent more than a few private, brooding hours there upon its faded green velvet cushions, and he’d swept away the cobwebs and wasps’ nests and detritus of neglect so that it was a comfortable if not a luxurious space.

 

It was, at any rate, private.

 

Here, Patrick learned that the scarring on Chaz’s face continued down the left side of his body to just above his pelvis, ruined skin running like shiny red wax in rivulets of diminishing width.  He learned that while Chaz couldn’t feel lips upon that skin, he could feel Patrick’s teeth and the pressure of his hand pressing down on his shoulder or his fingers pinching his left nipple hard.

 

He learned that Chaz had lost nothing of his skill with his right hand, though the fingers of his left had only limited function, and that his mouth was hot and wet and perfect and his cock hard and straight and perfect and that there was nothing left in Patrick that wanted to die unless it was of unfettered pleasure and unutterable joy.

 

As they caught their breath after, Patrick sprawled across Chaz’s good right side, Chaz’s arm tight around him, Chaz talked in the obscure coded language of the invalided veteran, a language Patrick perfectly understood, of his ‘rescue’ by the Turks and the weeks of feverish captivity on the screaming edge of oblivion. 

 

Of his final rescue by General Allenby’s forces and his time at Cairo—he’d missed Patrick there by a mere week.  Of the months in an Australian hospital and the long weeks of pain and boredom on the ship home.

 

Of his attempts to locate Patrick—“Do you know how many Patrick Murphys have died in this blasted war?” Chaz asked, tightening his hold.

 

Of his trips to sanitariums and churchyards and bursars’ offices.

 

“I thought you’d died,” Chaz confessed into Patrick’s sweat-dampened hair.

 

“I know the feeling,” Patrick answered, sucking a kiss into the hollow at the base of Chaz’s throat.

 

“I have some things you need to know about me,” Patrick said then in the spirit of confessions and making a clean start.

 

“You can tell me anything,” Chaz promised, so Patrick did.

 

By the time he was done with the story, they were propped side by side against one of the gazebo’s box seats, Chaz’s wool greatcoat rough beneath their naked thighs.

 

Chaz was holding his hand, playing with his fingers, running a finger down his palm, looking everywhere but in Patrick’s eyes.

 

“Still love me?” Patrick asked, trying to sound light-hearted and knowing he’d failed by the way Chaz tightened his grip on Patrick’s hand.

 

“I will always love you,” Chaz promised then, turning to kneel beside him, cupping his face in his big, broad hands, leaning in for a lingering but chaste kiss—the kind that in the old stories would have sealed a troth-plighting.

 

“And I you,” Patrick answered when his breath returned to him.

 

The moment was broken by a high, shrilling whistle coming from across the valley.

 

“That would be Dylan signaling that it’s time I was going up to the manor.  I’m supposed to be leaving this afternoon.”

 

“Really?  Have you any plans?”

 

“Thought I might try to see a bit of the world.  Heard there are some bonny bright lads in Australia.”

 

“Hmmm, I’ve heard the same,” Chaz answered, helping Patrick to his feet and retrieving various items of their discarded clothing.

 

As they dressed, they swapped increasingly ridiculous ideas for what they might do to keep body and soul together in Australia, settling at last on falconry and sheep-herding.

 

“Do you know the first thing about sheep?” Patrick asked dubiously.

 

“No, but I buggered a shepherd in Greece once.”

 

“Well,” Patrick said, “That makes you more of an expert than I am.”

 

“At buggering?”

 

Patrick’s laughter echoed up the valley as they walked toward the mews and the manor beyond.

 

“At sheep, you git,” Patrick answered finally.

 

“Well, we’ll learn, I suppose,” Chaz promised.

 

From the mews as they passed, Maisie gave an inquiring noise, and Patrick paused to look in on her and say, “There now, all will be well.  We’ll bring you with us when we go.”

 

He imagined her flying over the bush of Australia, stooping to a rabbit or soaring high in ever-expanding circles, answering only to her instinct or his familiar whistle.

 

He imagined, too, Chaz, hair alight in the hot Australian sun, broad shoulders bare and strong for the work, days of labor and nights of loving, and through it all the freedom to be who they were beneath the wide blue sky, to be caught over and over in their fall by the strength and promise of their love.

 

Laughing suddenly, exhilarated by the future in a way he’d never been before, Patrick threw his arms around Chaz, damn anyone who might see them from the manor, and kissed him soundly on his grinning, wicked mouth.

 

Fumbling toward ecstasy, they had at last found it, and somewhere in the distant desert of his dead nightmares, a rough beast settled once more into stony sleep.


End file.
